Quite frankly, I don't have enough of a gamer's mind-set to even be a regular here, let alone a blog manager. What is LazarusWorld, after all, but a home for the collective of the Bad Boys of Computer Science, a comic which attracts teh l33t, teh pwned, and teh uber alike.

Yet, here I am, a writer and sometime graphic designer, afloat in a sea of tech fanatics -- a n00b, if you will. So sometimes I have to prove to myself that I actually belong here.

So I bought a Wii. And a couple of first-person RPGs. Unfortunately, I'm but three-quarters of the way through Super Paper Mario, and my interest is already starting to wane.

This happens every time. I'll get a game and I'll be determined to beat it. I'll play every day, enjoying myself immensely, watching the story progress. And then something happens. I get stuck on that one jumping level, or I can't figure out the puzzle in front of me, or the grinding for a level at which I can beat the next boss begins to irk. And then life happens, and I go away from the game and forget to finish it. So I never see the ending.

Not a problem, right? We know how all the games end -- the hero beats the menace to society and everyone lives happily ever after. Which, as I think about it, is my problem to begin with. Video games rarely have an original storyline, and rightly so. You don't want to battle through fortresses for thirty hours only to find that you're too late and everyone is already dead.

But when you know how it's going to end, and the wait for when you get to actually see the ending gets longer and longer, you start to question the point. At least I do. It's like reading the fourth Harry Potter book and finding out that Harry has to kill Voldemort in the end, and knowing the series is going to be seven books, and realizing, "Shit, I have to dredge through 2000 more pages when I already know the ending."

I did it, though. A quality story can get me back. It did with Harry Potter, and it will with Super Paper Mario. Even though I have long since figured out where the eighth Pure Heart will come from, I am determined to actually get it.

Posted by Endymion at May 28, 2008 09:37 PM